Azure AD Connect Health General Availability

Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Azure AD Connect Health, a feature for monitoring the status of your synchronization or federation between on-premises Active Directory (AD) and the cloud-based Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).

The Value of a Healthy Azure AD Connection

Microsoft describes Azure AD Connect Health as a feature that:

… helps you monitor and gain insights into your on-premises identity infrastructure and the synchronization services

Azure AD is used by all of Microsoft’s enterprise cloud services, such as Azure and Office 365, to authenticate and authorize users — many people are unaware that they are using Azure AD’s free version when they deploy Office 365. We can synchronize identity and password hashes from the cloud to Azure AD to get single sign-on with Microsoft’s cloud services and with at least 2,800 third-party cloud services, too, including Microsoft competitors such as SAP, Google, and AWS. The means for enabling this are:

Azure AD Connect Health for sync, which is built into Azure AD Connect (you must be on a current version), will be used by anyone using Azure AD Connect to synchronize identity to the cloud, sometimes referred to as shared sign-on; this solution offers the following features:

Monitoring and alerts to know if an Azure AD Connect server is not healthy

Email alerts for critical alerts

Sync operational insights

Quick glance information about properties and recent jobs

Information about object-level sync errors, which does not require Azure AD Premium

Azure AD Connect Health for sync [Image Credit: Microsoft]

Azure AD Connect Health for Active Directory Domain Services Preview

Not only can it monitor the health of your connection to Azure AD, but Microsoft also added a preview for monitoring on-premises domain health using Azure AD Connect Health for Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS), a critical element to the functionality of the total identity solution, supporting: